Friday, July 31, 2015

If China Sneezes, Does the U.S. Catch a Cold?(wallstreetonparade.com)U.S. exports to China in 2013 reached $122.1 billion, a 10.4% increase over 2012.That's ancient history now. Also: America's No. 1 trading partner, Canada, is officially in recession after two successive quarters of economic contraction. If the Fed were to hike rates now, strengthening the dollar even more, it would be a disaster for U.S. exports. As it is, disaster will be hard to route around.

Wyoming Man Had Eyeballs Stored in His Anus (crazed.com) Bovine, not human. But still: "Police made a routine traffic stop early Thursday morning and got more than they bargained for when Roy Tilbott, 51, stepped out of his El Camino for a field sobriety test and Casper Police noticed several eyeballs slide from his right pant leg onto the road." Greatest, opening, sentence, ever.

EM Drive engine.

NASA Evaluates EM Drive (nasaspaceflight.com). At a conference in Orlando this week, Dresden University professor Martin Tajmar provided up-to-date data showing that the EM Drive developed by British inventor Roger Shawyer produces "thrust close to the actual predictions, after eliminating many possible error sources." (See story here.) The engine converts electrical energy to thrust by a mechanism still not 100% agreed upon; but the point is, after many years of tests, it's starting to look like the thing actually works, and NASA is all over it. Efficiency is not high (~1 newton of thrust per kilowatt) but is expected to go much higher as the design is refined.

The fix for police brutality may be to hire more female officers (WaPo). Research shows "female officers are less authoritarian in their approach to policing,
less reliant on physical force, and are more effective communicators.
Most importantly, female officers are better at defusing potentially
violent confrontations before those encounters turn deadly."

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